Comely Maidens Dancing at the Cross Roads - Lipstick, Powder & Politics

May 11, 1986
[SIZE=+3]Why Irish Heroines Don't Have To Be Good Anymore[/SIZE] By EDNA O'BRIEN

I left my father's house.
And ran away with you.
And that was no bad choice
You gave me everything.
hat poem was composed by Eileen O'Leary in 1773 after her husband had been killed by a British soldier. Her husband, Art O'Leary, who was an officer in the Austrian Army, refused to sell his favorite mare to the British soldier and was shot because Catholics were not permitted by law to possess a horse of more than $:5 in value. She describes in detail her husband's beauty, his white breast, his valor, the children who do not yet know of the tragedy and how she came to know of it when the horse came back, bridle trailing, bloodied from forehead to polished saddle. She mounted it and was brought to the spot where her husband lay. Your blood in torrents Art O'Leary I did not wipe it off I drank it from my palms.
It is one of the most rapacious love poems and one of the greatest laments ever written. Passion is given full rein. No timidity here, no deference to the weaker sex. The words and the emotions are as bold and declarative as a man's. Incest and jealousy are then raised when in the poem his sister speaks - she tells of her own grief and how desolated the women of Cork will be, those women who would not sleep alone if they could sleep with Art.
It is in the glorious tradition of fanatic Irish writing which flourished before sanctity and propriety took over. Another such poem is ''The Old Woman of Beare,'' in which a goddess has to put aside earthly pleasures and become a nun. She reflects on her figure as it once was, plump and round, her cloak, her jewelry and ''men most dear - horseman, huntsman, charioteer.'' She admits that her body is now so scraggy it would make a boy start in dread and nobody comes to comfort her in her dark cell.
There is Grania (similar to Iseult), the sorceress who left her elderly royal husband and eloped with a young lover, Diarmuid. She sits over his bed of rushes, singing him to sleep with a lullaby about her other illicit lovers, those who for one sweet night forgot the terrors of their flight.
Love and passion suffused these early poems, both those written by women and those written about women. What makes them so modern is that the women took the initiative in love and courted their men with words and flattery the way knights courted women. It is true that all these heroines came to a calamitous end but their tragedy is grand tragedy and not a rasping lay composed by a merely bitter woman. When Deirdre of the Sorrows saw her husband slain she tore her golden hair out, became distraught, uttered the most rending lament and then fell down beside him, and died.
Times changed and things became more conventional. The daring or dauntless woman was still retained in fiction but as a secondary or even a ludicrous character. Irish heroines had to be gentle, tremulous, gullible, devout, masochistic and beautiful. The most famous was in a 19th-century novel called ''The Collegians'' by Gerald Griffin. It charts the fate of a young girl called Eily O'Connor, a rope maker's daughter, of ''a timid hesitancy, downcast gentleness of manner which shed an interest over all her motions and a tongue that seemed to move on sil-ver wires.'' She is of course extremely devotional, an adoring daughter and a wonderful cook. Naturally this perfect vessel is ready for contamination and the redemption that eventually comes with it. Her father chooses a sensible suitor for her whom she rejects, then she leaves home, meets a cad called Hardress, falls hopelessly in love with him, gets married in secret, is banished to a lonely cottage and eventually has to be bumped off because his mother wishes him to marry a rich heiress. However, her body is washed up on the shores and true to the mores of sentiment Eily is found lying in the mud, her blue mantle over her frame, her small feet in Spanish leather shoes and in her death her virtue inviolate, perfectly embodying Portia's description of the candle - ''a good deed in a naughty world.''
A plethora of such heroines with hazel eyes, auburn hair, all either ruined or reaching the brink and rescued by a man ''bearing a small packet, really to be too small but what the girl's throbbing heart divined it to be - an engagement ring.'' These were one's daily or rather one's nightly meat, read with a light of candle or a flashlight because to read at all was a sin. Oh to be them, to have finery, hectic flushes, smelling salts, secret liaisons and fairly cretinous psyches.
There was of course another kind of heroine and two in particular were living legends both for their beauty and their patriotism. One was Constance Markiewicz, of whom Yeats wrote the great poem -The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle.
She fought in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, was captured, sentenced to death but got a reprieve and died a pauper. Such was her spirit that it is said that as she got ready to fight in the rebellion she said, ''I'll have a pistol here and a pistol here and my best hat.'' The undoubted queen was of course Maud Gonne MacBride, whom Yeats described as ''high and solitary and most stern.'' He asked if there was ''another Troy for her to burn.'' Poetry was not her passion, politics and revolution were. She went around the country spurring people to fight, to throw off the yoke of England, and so dazzled were they by her passion and her appearance that they touched her garments hoping to be saved. She was both muse and tormentor to Yeats, who was besotted by her pale luminous skin, her red-gold hair, her fierce eyes flecked with gold and above all her disdain of conjugal love in favor of lofty patriotism.
One day in the early 1950's I saw a very tall woman in St. Stephen's Green in Dublin, bending over to talk to someone; she was dressed completely in black, almost like a nun, and indeed had what Yeats's sister Lily described as a sort of royal smile. It was Maud Gonne, the ''burning cloud,'' as Yeats described her. Seeing her sent a shiver through me. I had touched or rather glimpsed both politics and poetry. Unwittingly it spurred me to write.
Around the same time I made my first acquaintance with the greatest of Irish literary heroines -Pegeen Mike in J. M. Synge's ''Playboy of the Western World.'' This was no Deirdre but rather a plucky heroine who befriends a young man who claims to have murdered his Da. It was this play which made the zealots of Dublin riot on the opening night proclaiming that no Irish woman would spend a night under the same roof as a man unless she was married to him and no Irish woman would befriend a murderer. Although Pegeen loves Christy Mahon she makes certain to taunt him and even conjectures aloud on the grisliness of his hanging - ''It'd make the green stones cry itself to think of you swaying and swiggling at the butt of a rope.'' Like many another Irish heroine she has in the end to be reconciled to the loss of Christy, whose irate father comes and drags him home with a halter. She utters the great line - ''Oh my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World.''
It was with this jumble of association and dream and hope that I first sat down to write. Realizing that the earlier heroines were bawdy and the later ones lyrical I decided to have two, one who would conform to both my own and my country's view of what an Irish woman should be and one who would undermine every piece of protocol and religion and hypocrisy that there was. As well as that, their rather meager lives would be made bearable by the company of each other. Kate was looking for love. Baba was looking for money. Kate was timid, yearning and elegiac. Baba took up the cudgel against life and married an Irish builder who was as likely to clout her as to do anything else. That was 20 years ago. The characters remained with me as ghosts, but without the catharsis of death. I had never finished their story, I had left them suspended, thinking perhaps that they could stay young indefinitely or that their mistakes might be canceled out or they would achieve that much touted fallacy - a rebirth.
Coming back to them I knew that Baba's asperity had to prevail. Heroines don't have to be good anymore, because more women are writing fiction and are eager to express the more volatile part of themselves; equally they are less beholden to men. The masks are coming off by the minute. Long ago I had Baba exclaim, ''It's not the vote women need, we should be armed,'' and I was castigated for it, charged with raucousness and a fatal departure from my lyrical self. But lyricism had to go, just as emotion had to be purged. In his film ''The Marriage of Maria Braun,'' Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who knew a thing or two) had a character say, ''It is not a good time out in the world for emotions, anymore.'' Lament it as we may we must accept that fact. Baba's voice is relevant to now, her assault on the world around her, the world of both men and women that she surveys with a scalding humor. I don't think it is that I have grown angrier with the years but rather more aware, and to wage war with words is a far healthier way than any other kind of warfare.
Baba came to me partly through an impatience with my own character and partly in acknowledgment of that long line of daring and invincible heroines which includes Nana, Becky Sharp, Molly Bloom and Scarlett O'Hara. Above all I like to remember what Yeats said, which is that it was ''his job to die blaspheming.''
Edna O'Brien is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, including ''A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories.''

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http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/09/specials/obrien-heroines.html

In the winter of 1909 a sensational case of murder was broadcast in the national press, and at the center of it was a young police constable from County Mayo.

The area around Craughwell, County Galway had been for many years a disturbed and violent region due to the effects of the Land Wars; a political and economic movement dedicated to redistributing land held by landlords and large farmers. Although the movement had largely died out it was re-ignited in South Galway by one Tom Kenny, a member of the IRB and (later) Sinn Fein. As part of his activities he selected the 16 acre farm at Templemartin to be targeted and broken up, with the land distributed to the members of his society. Against him was the landlord, Lord Clanricarde, and his tenant farmer Mary Ryan. Mrs Ryan was a widow and had returned from America some years ago with her two children aged 18 and 13. She was from Craughwell, and aware of the tensions in the area, had got the blessing of the local United Irish League to move onto the farm. However this did not satisfy Tom Kenny, and she was subjected to a campaign of vicious intimidation with shots being fired near her as she walked home, her hay burned, and the walls of her farm being overthrown (under Irish law an unfenced farm could be grazed by anyone - it was treated as common land).

During the week leading up to the murder two workmen named Malone and Coady were repairing the wall, under the protection of a single police constable. On Friday 22 January Constable Martin Goldrick was detailed to the job. Around 8.30 a.m. shots were fired by three men lying in bushes near a railway bridge, seriously injuring the two workmen. Constable Goldrick immediately moved towards the men who fled, but he continued to chase them with his revolver drawn. The men then turned and fired a shotgun from about 25 yards distance into Goldrick's forearm. He collapsed into a sitting position in a gap in the wall and tried to staunch the blood flow with a handkerchief. Meanwhile the men were closing cautiously on him, and when they were within 5 yards range they fired a second shotgun blast into his chest. He died instantly.

The police party sent to investigate on the day of the murder.outside Mrs Ryans's cottage.



A witness had seen the entire spectacle from the bridge and identified two men who were brought to trial. The court case was drawn out over several months but the men were acquitted. Nine others were bound over for intimidating Mrs Ryan's 11 year old boy. The man who had actually fired the fatal shot was never arrested but spent the rest of his life repenting what he had done. Tom Kenny, who was the cause of all the trouble, was ousted by the local farmers and suffered violent harassment himself; he eventually moved to America and only returned to Ireland after the Civil War.

Mrs Ryan continued on the farm. The 1911 census shows her as still living there with her son Michael (now) aged 15, he is shown as being an American citizen. Craughwell continued to have a large police protection, two Huts being erected in the vicinity to house about 12 men.

Constable Martin Goldrick 61943 was born at Killala, County Mayo and had been in the police for only 3 years. He was 24 years old when he was killed. The RIC erected a tablet to his memory which was placed over the fireplace of the Depot Library. It read:

"Erected by the Officers and Men of the Royal Irish Constabulary in memory of Constable Martin Goldrick, who fell while bravely discharging his duty at Craughwell, County Galway, on 22nd January 1909".

• Three Revolutionary Sisters
• Moya Llewelyn Davies

Left Lily O'Brennan photographed with the delegation that negotiated the Treaty, 1921. Image courtesy of the Kilmainham Gaol Collection.
Right Áine and Rónán Ceannt, from the Catholic Bulletin, 1916. McCoole Collection.
Three Revolutionary Sisters

Elizabeth (Lily) O'Brennan. Born: Dublin 1878. Died: Dublin, 31 May 1948
Kathleen (Kit) O'Brennan. Born: Unknown. Died: Unknown, 12 May 1948
Áine Ceannt née Fanny O'Brennan. Born: Dublin, 23 September 1880. Died: Dundrum, 2 February 1954. Buried: Deansgrange Cemetery, Dublin.
In Deansgrange Cemetery a grey headstone carved in old Irish script has an inscription in Gaelic that Áine, widow of Eamonn Ceannt (one of the leaders of 1916 Rising) is buried at that location. The headstone was erected a member of Eamonn Ceannt's 1916 Battalion, and because of this gesture, the resting place of three exceptional O'Brennan sisters - Elizabeth (Lily), Kathleen (Kit) and Fanny (who changed her name to Áine) has been marked.
Áine married Eamonn Ceannt in June 1905 and they had one son, Rónán, born in June 1906. Eamonn became a founder member of the Irish Volunteers, Áine and Lily were members of Cumann na mBan. Lily was a member of the Marrowbone Lane garrison, under command of her brother-in-law. Áine, like the other wives, did not take part. Kit was not in Ireland. She emigrated to the United States where she worked as a journalist. She remained active in nationalist circles and Irish American organisations.
Like many of the other widows of the 1916 leaders Áine assumed a public role following the Rising. She was Vice President of Cumann na mBan from 1917 to 1925 and simultaneously a member of the standing committee of Sinn Féin.
During the War of Independence, Áine acted as a District Justice in the Sinn Féin courts in the Dublin suburbs of Rathmines and Rathgar. She acted as arbitrator for Dáil Éireann's Labour Department in wage disputes throughout the country. In 1920 she became a founding member of the Irish White Cross, a non-political organisation set up during the War of Independence to assist the families of Volunteers. She subsequently was elected Deputy Vice Chairman and served with the organisation until 1947. In America, Kit was arrested in Washington for pasting posters denouncing 'British Militarism' in Ireland. Meanwhile Lily was on the staff of the Ministry of Labour in the underground government, and wrote for the Irish Bulletin. She was secretary to the delegation that negotiated the Treaty in 1921, which brought about the Irish Free State.
Both Lily and her sister Áine opposed the Treaty and in the Civil War that followed were active on the Republican, or Anti-Treaty, side. Lily worked for Erskine Childers and for the Sinn Féin organisation. She was arrested at their offices in 1922 and spent almost a year in prison in Mountjoy, Kilmainham and the North Dublin Union.
Áine and Lily spent their final years living in Dundrum. Áine was a founder member of the Red Cross, serving as Honorary Treasurer of the Society from its inception in 1939 until 1947. Lily worked in the civil service and published a number of books in both English and Irish. Kit remains a mysterious figure who died in May 1948, the same month as her sister Lily - they were buried together in Deansgrange Cemetery. Áine died six years later and is buried beside them.


http://www.sineadmccoole.com/gonebutnotforgotten%5C/independence/three-revolutionary-sisters.htm

Left Memorial Card for Kathleen Clarke. McCoole Collection.
Right Gravestone of Kathleen Clarke in Deansgrange Cemetery. Photo: Tara O'Reilly.
The Widow: Kathleen Clarke

Born: Limerick, 1878
Died: Liverpool, September 29 1972
Buried: Deansgrange Cemetery, Dublin.
Kathleen Clarke, formerly Kathleen Daly from Limerick, liked people to address her by her married name, Mrs Tom Clarke. Her gravestone reads: Chaitlin Ui Chleirigh, Baintreach, Tomáis S UÍ Cléirigh, a básaíodh i mBaile Átha Cliath, Bealtaine 3 1916. [Kathleen Clarke, widow, Thomas S Clarke, died in Dublin, 3 May 1916.]
During her long widowhood of over 50 years she accomplished much. She was the first Lady Mayoress of Dublin, a TD, and a Senator but there is no mention of these facts on her gravestone. Yet her contribution was important enough to warrant a State funeral, which was recorded on film.
In 1901 at the age of 23, Kathleen Daly married a man 20 years her senior. He was to her the embodiment of a heroic Irishman. Tom Clarke had served a 15 year sentence in England for treason. The couple had three sons - John Daly Clarke (b1902), Tom Junior (b.1908) and Emmet (b1910). Tom Clarke's involvement in nationalist politics culminated in his participation in the 1916 Rising, and his subsequent execution. Kathleen's only brother Edward (Ned) Daly was another of the leaders to be executed.
Kathleen was a founder member of Cumann na mBan. She did not take part in the Rising as she had been selected by the Irish Republican Brotherhood to coordinate the distribution of support for the families of activists. Afterwards she was a key organizer in the aid distributed to prisoners' dependants, which was vital to establishing a network of sympathisers in the years of guerrilla war that followed.
During the War of Independence, she was an active fund-raiser, she sheltered men and women on the run and worked as a District Justice in the Sinn Féin courts in Dublin for the north city circuit, and also as Chairman of the Judges on this circuit. In 1919 she was elected Alderman for Dublin Corporation. In this capacity she served on numerous committees and boards. She was also active in the White Cross, a non-political organisation set up in 1920 to assist the families of Volunteers.
Although she opposed the Treaty, she was Chairman of a committee that tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a pact between Anti-Treaty and Pro-Treaty sides. The Irish Free State authorities imprisoned her for a short time in Kilmainham Jail in February 1923. In 1924 Kathleen went to the United States to lecture and raise funds on behalf of Republicans.
A founder member of Fianna Fáil, between 1928-1936 she served in the Senate. She was Dublin's first female Lord Mayor, 1939-1943. In 1948, at the age of 70, she stood unsuccessfully for the Clann na Poblachta party. Throughout the 1940s she served on numerous hospital boards and the National Graves Association.
In 1965 she left Ireland to live with her youngest son Emmet and his family in Liverpool, although she did return to Dublin in 1966 for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Rising. She died in Liverpool on the 29 September 1972 aged ninety-four.


http://www.sineadmccoole.com/gonebutnotforgotten%5C/1916/kathleen-clarke.htm

She now drew closer to republicans like Frank Ryan and Peadar O’Donnell, becoming Assistant Editor of An Phoblacht, the newspaper of the IRA.In 1930, in her capacity as secretary of the 'Friends of Soviet Russia', she travelled to Russia. On her return to Ireland she became Editor of the Republican File, a Republican Socialist journal, following the suppression of An Phoblacht and jailing of Frank Ryan. She became involved in the First National Aid Association which supported the dependents of Republican prisoners and gave continuous support to the Women’s Prisoners' Defence League. In January 1933 Hanna was jailed when she travelled to Newry, County Downspeaking on behalf of republican prisoners. She was arrested and held for 15 days in Armagh Jail as she defied an order banning from entering the Northern counties.
Her income still came from journalism and occasional lecturing in the United States and Canada. In 1935 she opposed the Conditions of Employment Bill, aware of how its terms would curb the activities of working women and when the Constitution was passed she was a founder member of the Women’s Social and Progressive League which attempted to alert women to the implications of the anti-woman legislation passing through the Dáil. However, they failed to gain support in the 1938 General Elections. She resumed teaching while continuing to write and to lecture and in 1943, at the age of 66, Hanna stood as an independent candidate for Dublin. She hoped that she and other candidates would form a Women's Party but all four women failed to get elected. Hanna suffered ill health for much of 1945. One of her rare outings was to the RTE studios, to be interviewed on her life. By 1946 she was unable to work. She died on Easter Saturday 20 April 1946. The Irish Times obituary described her as 'the ablest woman in Ireland'.

premierlass wrote: »

There's a new book about the Gifford sisters called Unlikely Rebels, reviewed here, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0326/1224293117961.html, which shows their interesting background (their brothers were baptised Catholic and remained unionist; the girls were baptised Protestant and took to nationalist politics) but it doesn't give much space to Sidney Gifford Czira, who I think was the most interesting.

Unlikely Rebels, The Gifford Girls and the Fight for Irish Freedom By Anne Clare,
Mercier, 2011
Reviewer: Mairead Carew
Unlikely Rebels The Gifford Girls and the Fight for Irish Freedom is a well written account of the role which the Gifford sisters – Grace, Muriel, Nellie,Ada, Kate and Sydney – were to play in 1916 and the struggle for independence.

They were ‘unlikely rebels’ as they were the daughters of Unionist parents, Frederick and Isabella Gifford. The sisters were raised Protestant but four of them subsequently converted to Catholicism. The Gifford parents disapproved of their daughters’ political activities and in particular the marriage of Grace to Joseph Plunkett​, one of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation. Indeed Isabella Gifford was ultimately to disinherit three of her daughters – Grace, Nellie and Sydney.

She was described by Nellie as ‘a hen who had hatched out ducklings.’ This is the real strength of this book – the human price paid for the struggle for independence.

However, the author is inclined to labour the point about her disrespect for revisionist history and that ‘It was the easiest thing in the world to set aside revisionists and happily associate with those who identified with the patriotic dead.’

The real strength of this book is showing the human price paid for the struggle for independence.
It is not within the remit of this article to argue this point, but the writing of history is not value-free and is always written from a particular perspective and within the context of the current cultural and political milieu. That said, the author adopts a compassionate and empathetic view of her subjects which not only brings them to life, but elucidates their possible motivations for their political activities and the thinking of the times which influenced them.

The reader is introduced to TempleVillas, the ten-roomed residence in Rathmines, where the Gifford children were reared and their nursemaid, Bridget Hamill. It was she and the servants who ‘passed on the deep resentments of a race never completely conquered, even after 700 years,’ while working in what was a typical Dublin Victorian household of the Ascendancy Protestant class. Their education is described bySydneyas follows: ‘It was a well-kept secret in my school that we lived inIreland, or had any history of our own at all.’

The best known of the sisters was Grace, who tragically married Joseph Plunkett, on the eve of his execution on 3 May 1916. Indeed, the original intention of the author was to tell the story of Grace but she decided that the story of the whole family was ‘well worth recording’. However, Grace still tends to dominate the book even though much use is made of the papers of Nellie Gifford-Donnelly.

Use is also made of Sydney’s memoir, entitled The Years Flew By. Clare’s book is a contribution to the cultural history of that period and also to women’s political history. For example, Grace, Muriel, Nellie andSydney attended AE’s literary salon withFrederick. There they met Casimir and Constance Markievicz​, the writers James Stephens and Padraic Colum​, the painter Sarah Purser, the Yeats family and Maud Gonne​.

The Gifford sisters were politicized through the medium of culture and were part of, according to the author ‘this Celtic buzz’. Thomas MacDonagh, who married Muriel Gifford, produced plays with Joseph Plunkett in the Irish language. MacDonagh wore Celtic dress, which included a kilt, brat and ‘Tara’ brooch, which scandalised respectable people in Rathmines.

The Gifford sisters, who came from the ‘Ascendancy’ class, were politicised through the medium of culture
The author notes that ‘Shamefully, the figure of Nurse O’Farrell was airbrushed out in the familiar photograph of Pearse surrendering’ in 1916. However, she redresses this state of affairs somewhat in elucidating, through the varied lives of the Gifford sisters, an often neglected aspect of Irish history. They had been involved in the 1913 strikes, the anti-conscription campaign, the Easter Rising​, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Nellie had served under Commandant Michael Mallin and Countess Markievicz at the Royal College of Surgeons. Her duties included bringing medicine and food and carrying dispatches. She lost her job as a result of her political activities.

She was also involved in anti-British activities in America, despite the fact that two of her brothers were in the British army. Her sister Adabecame ‘Ireland’s first self-appointed spy’ in America. Sydneyhad worked as a ‘propagandist journalist’ for Séan MacDiarmada’s Irish Freedom. She also served on the Sinn Féin executive.

She wrote for An Phoblacht in the 1920s. After 1916 Grace continued publishing her political cartoons and was elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1917. Kate was appointed as registrar of the first Dáil national loan. The Gifford sisters were all anti-treaty. Later, Nellie was ‘the secretary and moving spirit’ of the 1916 and War of Independence exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland.

An insight into the social history of the period is also provided. For example, a description is given of Nellie Gifford’s job as ‘an itinerant cookery instructress’ under the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction forIreland. She could only get accommodation in cottages as the ‘big houses’ did not take lodgers. She got herself dismissed from her accommodation as a result of her attendance at a local wake, which was frowned on by society at that time.

As well as the nationalist narrative, the book provides insights into the social and personal histories of the period
Occasionally the tone of the book is gossipy. For example, the marriage of Grace and Joseph Plunkett is described as ‘the wedding of the year in 1916.’ There’s a description of the clothes of Count Plunkett​ (Joseph’s father and Director of theNationalMuseum) when he was obliged to meet the Viceroy at the museum. An ex-girlfriend of MacDonagh, Mary Maguire who married Padraig Colum, the poet, and friend of MacDonagh and Pearse, is described as having been at boarding school with Rose Fitzgerald​ who married Joseph Kennedy and gave birth to JFK.

A story is included about the wedding of Thomas MacDonagh and Muriel Gifford, when Patrick Pearse​ was meant to be a witness but didn’t turn up and a man cutting a hedge stood in for him. However, these anecdotes and connections do not detract from the story and give it a humanity, often perhaps missing from more academic accounts of the revolutionary period. Nellie Gifford herself wrote that ‘Data is a cold affair, for the professors. History will be cold on the warm, human motive that impelled them [the Irish rebels] towards their target, or the odd kinks, loves and capabilities – all in short that make the man live on.’ Or woman!


http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/08/16/book-review-unlikely-rebels-the-gifford-girls-and-the-fight-for-irish-freedom/

Gas fitter Alfred Norgrove and his wife Maria, and seven children ranging in age from a baby to a 13-year-old, were living there at the time the 1911 census was taken.
The Norgrove parents, and two daughters named Emily and Annie, who would have been 18 and 16 in 1916, are documented for their part in the Rising.
Emily and Annie were members of the Irish Citizen Army positioned in City Hall, while Alfred was in the GPO and sent to City Hall on Easter Monday evening.
Mrs Norgrove, meanwhile, was in Jacobs.
Records show that after the Rising, Alfred Norgrove was removed from Richmond Barracks on May 8, 19016 and incarcerated in Wandsworth Detention Barracks, London, on May 9.

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